I've set up this blog as a place to tell stories about OSG Operations. These stories may include interesting events, technical problems that have led to important lessons learned, or anything about OSG Operations that may tend itself toward interesting telling. Contributor will consist of all OSG Operations personnel at the various institutions were OSG houses Operational Services.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

We've been experimenting with following new services in the last few month here at GOC.

event.grid.iu.edu (RabbitMQ/AMQP Server)

comet.grid.iu.edu (CometD Server)

RabbitMQ (event.grid.iu.edu) allows GOC, and OSG users to publish and/or subscribe to various messages generated by our services, and OSG in general. Currently, we receive following messages.

RSV status changes

OIM updates

GOC Ticket updates

GIP information changes (prototype)

Anyone can subscribe to these messages in XML format, and be notified in real time using AMQP messaging client. APIs are available in many languages including, Java, PHP, Python, etc..

CometD (comet.grid.iu.edu) allows us to push messages to our various web applications. For example, GOC Ticket uses it to display users who are currently viewing a ticket. If someone updates a ticket while someone else is viewing, it will send page refresh request to all viewers. CometD can also be used to implement features such as chat, shared editing, and other functionalists.

CometD itself is a Java application framework where we can implement various services that client (web browsers) can make requests to. CometD acts as a glue between RabbitMQ and the web browsers. For example, "GOC event service" in comet.grid.iu.edu subscribes to RSV, OIM, and GOC tickets events, and pools all recent events. A web browsers can then make a request to download these events during the initial loading of a page, and it will subscribe to "new event" queue on comet in order to receive new events in real time until user closes the page.

By using Event & Comet services, we can implement interesting features such as Realtime GOC event (prototype) in MyOSG. My current goal is to continue experimenting with RabbitMQ/CometD and see what I can (and can not) accomplishing using these tools.

If anyone has an idea about what we can do with these tools, please feel free to send me a message.